As promised, here's a post about the process we used to produce our book in spite of the many competing demands on our time (more to come).
Once Reshan and I decided that we were going to write this book, we settled in to a disciplined routine. We treated the project like a job, which meant showing up to work on it at regular intervals outside the hours we spend at work or with our families. We worked during the proverbial "nights and weekends," or more precisely, mornings and weekends. What we found was a pretty simple formula: 40 to 60 minutes each morning, six days a week, week after week, makes a book.
It's a shame that writing is often wrapped up in mystical garb -- as if you have to be divinely inspired to write poems or short stories or articles or books. Feeling energized / inspired is certainly helpful when you sit before a blank screen or page. But if you feel like you can't approach blank screens or pages or canvases unless you feel a certain way (i.e., inspired) then you probably won't fill in that blankness with any regularity, which means you won't create with any regularity.
On good days, writers write. On the other days, they type. Words add up to sentences add up to paragraphs add up to chapters. 40 to 60 minutes each morning, six days a week, week after week, makes a book.
Maybe we're just getting older, or maybe the fact that we don't have much time has caused us to develop a pragmatic approach to our passion projects. But we certainly weren't alone in 2013; in fact, our process was similar to the one championed all over the Internet this past year.
2013 was the year where people like Austin Kleon (of Steal Like an Artist fame) and Maria Popova (of Brainpickings.com fame), two great sources of online leadership in the creative mentorship category, started to really hammer home the idea that writers and artists need routines.
Popova, in a great post on creativity, quoted Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”
And Kleon, whose "something small, every day" approach mirrors our own, quoted Oliver Burkman (quoting Chuck Close) in another post:
Once Reshan and I decided that we were going to write this book, we settled in to a disciplined routine. We treated the project like a job, which meant showing up to work on it at regular intervals outside the hours we spend at work or with our families. We worked during the proverbial "nights and weekends," or more precisely, mornings and weekends. What we found was a pretty simple formula: 40 to 60 minutes each morning, six days a week, week after week, makes a book.
It's a shame that writing is often wrapped up in mystical garb -- as if you have to be divinely inspired to write poems or short stories or articles or books. Feeling energized / inspired is certainly helpful when you sit before a blank screen or page. But if you feel like you can't approach blank screens or pages or canvases unless you feel a certain way (i.e., inspired) then you probably won't fill in that blankness with any regularity, which means you won't create with any regularity.
On good days, writers write. On the other days, they type. Words add up to sentences add up to paragraphs add up to chapters. 40 to 60 minutes each morning, six days a week, week after week, makes a book.
Maybe we're just getting older, or maybe the fact that we don't have much time has caused us to develop a pragmatic approach to our passion projects. But we certainly weren't alone in 2013; in fact, our process was similar to the one championed all over the Internet this past year.
2013 was the year where people like Austin Kleon (of Steal Like an Artist fame) and Maria Popova (of Brainpickings.com fame), two great sources of online leadership in the creative mentorship category, started to really hammer home the idea that writers and artists need routines.
Popova, in a great post on creativity, quoted Chuck Close: “Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”
And Kleon, whose "something small, every day" approach mirrors our own, quoted Oliver Burkman (quoting Chuck Close) in another post:
[T]he daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists – people who really do get a lot done – very rarely include techniques for ‘getting motivated’ or ‘feeling inspired’. Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasise the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on accomplishingertain physical actions, regardless of mood. Anthony Trollope wrote for three hours each morning before leaving to go to his job as an executive at the post office; if he finished a novel within a three-hour period, he simply moved on to the next. (He wrote forty-seven novels over the course of his life.) The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.’
What will you be working on in 2014? Let us know . . . maybe we can help.